"Go and Sin No
More": Therapy and Exorcism
in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Deviance

Philip Jenkins

2001

Since the Enlightenment, supernatural
notions of demonic intervention in human affairs have largely been rendered
obsolete by developments in social and behavioral science, and these ideas are
commonly derided. In modern thought, acts once regarded as sinful are rather to
be treated as personal or social dysfunctions. Yet despite a change in
rhetoric, and a shift to medical language, older views of evil remain clearly
in view. I want to explore the survival, and indeed revival, of revival of
older demonic concepts of evil in modern discussions of wrongdoing.

I will concentrate on the traditionally
conceived sin of lust, and its modern manifestation in sex crime. Much
contemporary rhetoric about sex crime resembles older ideas of possession, in
that the acts are seen not merely as isolated phenomena but as conditions
integral to the individual, which can probably never be cured. In addition,
affected individuals are believed to suffer from an overwhelming compulsion to
repeat their misdeed with great frequency. This is especially true of crimes
like child molestation, rape, and sexual murder. In many ways, we are dealing
here with a thought-world reminiscent of ancient notions of possession - and
that notion itself has enjoyed a substantial revival through theories of
multiple personality. I believe that the supposed secularization of attitudes
to wrongdoing is largely illusory, and modern notions retain what are clearly
powerful and widespread intuitive beliefs about the nature and causation of
evil.

I will use three illustrative examples,
though there is a great deal of overlap in these areas. Respectively, I will
examine the notion of "lust murder" and serial killers; or
"sexual predators" and child molesters; and of the
"demonic" aspects of the recovered memory movement.

Lust Murder

I will begin with a phrase that is quite
familiar to scholars of violent crime. Everybody knows - or thinks they can
deduce - the meaning of the phrase "Lust murder". Obviously, it means
a killing carried out in circumstances of extreme and uncontrollable sexual
desire, and characterized by grotesque mutilations. It is a
"monstrous" sexual murder. Unfortunately, that is simply not that the
term should mean. The term is a mistranslation of the German phrase Lustmörd,
meaning murder for pleasure or, a better rendering, recreational homicide. It
has no sexual connotation, still less does it indicate any connection with the
traditional deadly sin of "lust". The phrase traces back to the
psychiatrists and scholars reacting to the serial murder weave that affected
Germany in the early twentieth century, and it was intended to be a technical
and secular description, with no connotations of "monsters" or (still
less) "evil".The view
at the time was, naturally, that scholars just should not think that way. Yet
when translated into English, "lust murder" reverted to ancient ideas
of moral evil and depraved sexuality.

I am not sure who first introduced the
phrase into English, but "lust-murder" appears in early translations
of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis; andKrafft-Ebing
differed from many German scholars in his aggressive emphasis on the sexual
aspects of multiple homicide.German exiles and expatriates were freely using this terminology by the
1930s, and so were their American pupils. Walter Bromberg's psychiatric studies
of homicide were speaking of lust-killers in these years, and by the 1960s the
phrase was thoroughly domesticated. We find titles like Henry Klinger, Lust
for Murder (1966), and the language of lust-killing permeated the serial
murder scare of the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1988,
Joel Norris wrote that about five thousand Americans each year, “fully 25
percent of all murder victims - were struck down by murderers who did not know
them and killed them for the sheer ‘high’ of the experience. The FBI calls this
class of homicides serial murders and their perpetrators recreational or lust
killers … . the FBI has estimated that there are at least five hundred serial
killers currently at large and unidentified in this country.” Interestingly,
Norris is aware of the origin of the term lust-killer, but he then goes on to
speak as if the offenders are motivated by sexual lust; and he was not
unusual in this. Ann Rule's study of serial killer Jerry Brudos was
entitled Lust Killer, and a comparable offering from Gary C. King was Blood
Lust: portrait of a serial sex killer.

These books can be seen as obviously
sensational, but the lust-killing theme was popularized in one of the
best-known feminist explorations of serial murder, Deborah Cameron and
Elizabeth Frazer's The Lust to Kill : a feminist investigation of sexual
murder (New York : New York University Press, 1987). Cameron and Frazer
were obviously working from a highly secular approach, and yet used the emotive
and indeed religious language of "lust". The reason of course was
that their explanation of serial murder was that it was the product of
specifically male characteristics, above all aggressive sexuality, for which
this animalistic language seemed appropriate.

The term "lust-murder" has
become so familiar that it is easy to forget just how ancient and indeed
archaic it is, dating back to the time when religious explanations of crime
were basically all that was available. The language is emphatically
pre-scientific, and pre-psychiatric. Indeed, it was quite familiar in the days
when English criminal indictments regularly began with the declaration that X,
not having the fear of God before his eyes, did wilfully and knowingly do a
particular deed. I could offer countless illustrations here, but one apposite
title appeared from Henry Goodcole, writing in England as long ago in 1635.
This was Heaven's speedie hue and cry sent after lust and murder,manifested upon the suddaine
apprehending of Thomas Shearwood, and Elizabeth Evans, whose manner of lives,
death, and free confessions, are heere expressed. In the nineteenth
century, William Jarman wrote an anti-cult exposé of the Latter Day Saints
under the title Hell on Earth - scenes of Mormon life - how women and girls
are ensnared - lust and murder in the name of religion. Messrs Goodcole and
Jarmanwould no doubt be delighted
to know that centuries after their time, expert criminologists would still be
employing their essential framework of lust, murder, and the wiles of the
devil. Then as now, Lust and Murder seemed logically to go together, like
strawberries and cream.

The use of a misleading phrase would be
of little significance if it did not have very considerable policy
consequences. Once we have concluded that serial murder is
"lust-murder", then we have decided that the shape of the problem is
strictly defined, and that other possible avenues of exploration are irrelevant.
We have nothing to say, for instance, about multiple homicide by women, of
crimes against non- "lustful" targets, like the elderly; or of crimes
that have no obviously "lustful" content, especially the medical
killings that represent so large a component of the serial murder phenomenon.
Once we have accepted the notion of lust-murder, the serial killer is strictly
defined. He is not just an individual of
indiscriminate age and gender, killing in more or less any fashion. The term
referred above all to“sex
killers” or “rippers", that is, specifically to men, virtually all white,
who kill repeatedly for obviously sexual motives. Moreover, they often engage
in extreme acts of sexual violence and mutilation.

In this
newer model, serial killers are viewed as predators, metaphorically at least as
wolves, preying on weaker human beings who are represented in the historically
familiar imagery of victims. The linkage between lust and predation is very old
- we often think of lechers as "wolves", and Plato's Phaedrus
notes that“The eager lover aspires to the boy just as the wolf desires
the tender lamb”. Murder victims are the "silent lambs" commemorated
in Thomas Harris' celebrated book, and the even more influential 1991 film.
Hunting metaphors abounded in the congressional hearings and news stories that
proliferated through the 1980s. Hart Fisher, the creator of a comic book
devoted to the deeds of Jeffrey Dahmer justified his project by claiming that
"Serial killers are the werewolves of the modern age. By day they walk
around unassuming, then boom! By night they turn into monsters. People want to
know why." By 1994, Time Magazinewas remarking on the
national fascination with serial killers, in an article memorably entitled
"Dances with werewolves". By succumbing so utterly to lust - the
deadliest of sins - they have sold themselves to the devil, lost their
humanity, and abandoned true human status. Or so the mythology holds.

In this view, serial
offenders are explicitly monsters, a word freely used in popular culture
accounts for the phenomenon. Former FBI investigator Robert Ressler has written
memoirs entitled Whoever Fights Monsters andI Have Lived in the Monster, and in 1993, CNN ran a major documentary on serial murder
under the title Monsters Like Us. Some recent popular culture treatments
have included titles like Monstrum, Monster, Eye of the
Beast, and Shadows of Evil. (James 1997;
Jackson 1998; Adams et al 1999; Smith 2001; Ressler and Schachtman 1992, 1997).
Developing the notion of predatory wolves, the 1996 film Freeway overtly
used the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood as its plot framework, with its
itinerant killer named "Bob Wolverton". Equally folkloric in its
structure is the whole sequence of Thomas Harris novels and films, in which the
relationship of FBI agent Clarice Starling to serial killer Hannibal Lecter is
roughly that of Beauty to the Beast (Warner 1994, 1999).

In these treatments, the word
"monster" sometimes ceases to be a metaphor, as serial killers
acquire supernatural and demonic traits. This is apparent in films like the Nightmare
on Elm Street series, in which the demon killer materializes in dreams, or Candyman,
where the homicidal ghost is summoned into the world of the living through a
mirror. Long-running franchises like Halloween and Friday the
Thirteenth likewise exist on the assumption that the killer who died at the
end of each episode could be resurrected for the next instalment. At the end of
the first Halloween movie, it is the psychiatrist who explains that the
killer Michael Myers was in fact the bogeyman. In the 1995 film Seven,
the killer is a Mephistophelean figure whose violent deeds are shaped by the
traditional concept of the Seven Deadly Sins. The young heroes of The Blair
Witch Project (1999) seem to fall victim to an undead killer who survives
through pagan and supernatural rituals.

Such predatory beings must be
“hunted down”, and we read of investigators being engaged in
"Mind-hunting." One leading exponent of this idea is former FBI
agent, John Douglas, whose books include such potent titles as Mind Hunter,Journey into Darkness andObsession
(Douglas and Olshaker 1995, 1997, 1998). With few exceptions, “serial
murder” books or films describe the tracking and capture or destruction of
monsters on their home territory, in their lairs, as reason and courage triumph
over chaos and evil. The conflict, this "journey into darkness", fits
naturally into a Freudian interpretation, with serial killers being portrayed
in terms of the lustful and destructive qualities of the id, while the heroes
who challenge and suppress them epitomize the controlled and rational forces of
the superego. BSU "mind-hunter" Roy Hazelwood describes the sinister
region that he explores as one of Dark Dreams (Michaud and Hazelwood
1998; Hazelwood and Michaud
2001).

Predators

And of course, it was not
just serial killers who are predators. Just as "lust-murder" has been
widely accepted in criminological circles, so judges and legislators speak of
"predators" as if it represents a technically proper description of
human behavior, rather than a supernatural survival. Persistent child molesters
and rapists are of course predators par excellence, the subjects of what are
explicitly titles "Sexual Predator" laws, which have been largely
upheld by the US Supreme Court. In 1998, the US government passed its own
"Child Protection and Sexual Predator Punishment Act".

Though “predators” became
central to the legislative debate over sex crimes in the mid-1990s, the term
had no established legal meaning prior to that date, and had acquired its
sexual connotations only very recently (though it recalls terms used by J.
Edgar Hoover many years before). It is of course a metaphor: a predatory animal
is one which survives by hunting and eating other animals, and only by analogy
is this compared with the pursuit and sexual exploitation by humans of less
powerful strangers. Prior to the 1990s, the word “predator” appeared frequently
in news coverage, but when applied to human behavior, it was generally in the
context of financial activity, describing one corporation aggressively seeking
to take over another, and this usage became common in the merger boom of the
mid-1980s. Only as recently as 1990 does the term acquire a sexual or violent
sense, and even then it was sufficiently unusual to merit quotation marks and
some additional explanation.

Before 1990, the word was
mainly used in a sexual sense in the literature of crime fiction and true
crime, where it appeared extensively in book titles and blurbs, alongside the
phrases we have already noticed implying primitivism, animal savagery, and
hunting (“mind-hunters” and so on). Descriptions of real-life compulsive sex
offenders as predators can be traced to the work of two specific crime writers,
namelyAndrew Vachss and Jack
Olsen. Vachss regularly used the word in this context from about 1990 in his
novels and newspaper columns. In 1990, he warned that “Today's Abused Child
Could Be Tomorrow's Predator,” a pioneering example of the use of predator as
synonymous with multiple molester. In 1993, Vachss wrote -incredibly - that
“Chronic sexual predators have crossed an osmotic membrane. They can’t step
back to the other side - our side. And they don’t want to. If we don’t kill
them or release them, we have but one choice. Call them monsters and isolate
them.... I’ve spoken to many predators over the years. They always exhibit
amazement that we do not hunt them. And that when we capture them, we
eventually let them go. Our attitude is a deliberate interference with Darwinism
- an endangerment of our species.” (Vachss 1993). Olsen’s 1991 book Predator:
Rape, Madness, and Injustice in Seattle was a case-study of a serial rapist
active in Washington state, and presumably the book’s local appeal made it
familiar to legislators and media people in that region. The modern concept of
“sexual predators” originated in the figurative language of sensational crime
writers, and was increasingly associated with sexual violence and stalking,
that other hunting metaphor which entered the legislative code in just these
years. The predator concept received national currency from reporting of the
Washington statute, which in November 1991 was explored in a special episode of
48 Hours, entitled “Predators,” and thereafter, it entered popular
usage. Within a few years, we began hearing about "cyberspace
predators."

The influence of
"predator" terminology on recent legal thought is truly remarkable -
about as amazing, in fact, as if a modern US Congress passed a law against
vampires, ghouls or bogeymen. The underlying goals may be worthy, but the
intellectual framework is beneath contempt.

As in the case of
"lust-killers", the appropriation of sensationalistic language also
has serious social and legal consequences. If someone commits a sexual offense,
then there is no necessary reason why she or, more commonly, he, cannot be
treated, cured and rehabilitated. But a "predator" is a quite
different matter: who ever dreams of successfully treating monsters? Around the
time that the term "predator" was entering popular usage, attitudes
to sexual offenses against children were also being transformed by a thorough
reconfiguration of the notion of "pedophilia". Partlky, this was a
result of what seemed to be useful new research, since interviews of incarcerated
molesters suggested that even their lengthy arrest records were telling only a
very small part of the story. In extreme cases, convicted pedophiles were
reporting careers in which they had abused several hundred children, mostly
without legal consequences. The validity of such confessions was open to
debate, as imprisoned offenders of any sort tend notoriously to recount the
histories which they know to be expected by counselors and therapists, but it
was no longer feasible to repeat the view about molestation being a one-time
offense. New perceptions were reflected in the language used by both expert and
popular opinion, in which the term “pedophile” was extended to virtually anyone
convicted of a sexual offense with a minor, while the term acquired ever more
sinister connotations of obsession and violence. The more an act of molestation
was a symptom of an inherent personality disorder, the less amenable the
offender would be to either deterrence or reform. Meanings were aggravated in
the form “serial pedophile” or “serial molester,” which became common in the
late-1980s under the influence of the phrase “serial killer.” (The phantom
monster Freddie Kruger of Nightmare on Elm Street hadin lifebeen a child molester and killer).
Technically, the description of “serial pedophile” was accurate in that a
person who commits the same sort of crime repeatedly engages in a series of
offenses, but in practice the term implies compulsivity and extreme
dangerousness. "Pedophiles" acquired monster status; and monsters
cannot be treated. They must be "hunted" and caged.

Remembering the Devil

Blatantly supernatural
interpretations of deviance have in modern times been most closely associated
with the notion of Satanic and Ritual Abuse, which was at its height in this
country between about 1984 and 1994 - though the notion still survives in
isolated pockets of academe and the therapeutic professions. The SRA story is
too familiar to be told again here, but it should be stressed how
extraordinarily pre-modern and pre-scientific were the attitudes betrayed by
many investigators of the phenomenon. In theory, there is no reason why
extremely destructive cults might carry out countless violent and depraved
crimes, and it would be quite proper for law enforcement to try and prevent
them doing so. Just because an offender has a bizarre value system does not
mean that a police investigator must share those same ideas in order to be
effective: all the police officer needs to know is that actual crimes are being
committed in the secular world. If a cult genuinely were molesting and killing
thousands of children, then it would need to be stopped. The problem with SRA
was, of course, that nobody could ever establish that such wrong doing was in
progress.

Yet in other cases, investigators
themselves adopted beliefs and practices that were thoroughly supernatural, and
could really only be explained in terms of demonic or diabolical
interpretations of human behavior. This was especially evident in the area of
recovered memory therapy, a world thatoriginally had nothing to do with Satanic claims. The idea had its roots
in core Freudian beliefs about the power of infantile experiences connected
with sexuality, and the repression of memories in later life. These assumptions
became a powerful therapeutic trend during the early 1980s, when failings and
anxieties encountered by adult patients were traced to forgotten instances of
early abuse, which the therapist recovered through hypnosis or suggestion. In
1987, Judith Herman published what would become a classic study of the recovery
of abuse memories by a group of women in therapy. Once identified as incest
survivors, patients could confront their problems and begin a process of
healing their “inner child,” usually through self-help groups of comparable
survivors, following the familiar model of Alcoholics Anonymous. This vision
was publicized in self-help books like The Courage to Heal, by
Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.

Therapists accepted a strong
likelihood that abuse had occurred despite a lack of corroborating evidence,
except for ill-defined symptoms which others might identify as accidental
personality traits. The Courage to Heal assured readers that “If you are
unable to remember any specific instances...but still have a feeling that
something abusive happened to you, it probably did... If you think you were
abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.”... “Survivors go to
great lengths to deny their memories. One woman convinced herself it was all a
dream.” Skepticism was discouraged: E. Sue Blume wrote that “If you doubt you
were abused, minimize the abuse, or think ‘Maybe it’s my imagination’, these
are symptoms of post-incest syndrome.” That patients believed that horrible
acts had been done to them was in itself a fact of enormous significance, while
scepticism on the part of the therapist would violate the trusting relationship
believed essential for successful treatment. Counselors were instructed in the
cardinal doctrines of recovery: “Be willing to believe the unbelievable... No
one fantasizes abuse... Believe the survivor.” As SRA was so integral a part of
therapeutic culture in the mid-1980s, elements from that mythology influenced
the tales which therapists now drew forth from their cooperative subjects, so
that the imagined reality of this era was back-projected into earlier decades
to form a surreal nightmare pseudo-history. The Courage to Heal included
an influential section on ritual abuse and murder.

Though expressed in
psychological terms of self-help, the recovery movement owed its strength and
resilience to its pervasive ideological and religious quality. The treatment of
incest survivors implies archaic themes like the loss of primal innocence
through sexual sin, and the recovery of an untarnished child-like state.
Equally familiar to the evangelical tradition, this restoration often occurs in
a sudden emotional moment of realization, which is essentially a conversion
experience. The analogy is not perfect, in that the survivor is realizing not
her own lost and sinful state, but rather the evil visited upon her by a
victimizer, but the underlying structure of loss, regeneration and redemption
is accurate. Also recalling religious systems is the emphasis on faith, of
belief in the testimony of others, even if it directly contradicts common
sense: the children, external or internal, must be believed at all costs. As
with any religion, survivorship implies a total world-view impervious to
disproof or even challenge by conventional standards of evidence or rationality.

As the recovered memory
developed, its overtly supernatural quality became ever stronger. By the late
1980s, thousands of patients were reporting recollections of abuse that could
only be understood in the context of the sort of ritualistic cult-groups
described in Michelle Remembers, or the ongoing mass abuse cases, and
the claim was that early maltreatment left long-term consequences in the form
of psychic fragmentation. These claims were questionable, as allegations
derived from therapy were rarely subjected to any kind of factual verification,
while the explosion of MPD diagnoses raised suspicions about faddery. This
diagnosis was extremely rare and tentative diagnosis prior to the much
publicized 1973 book Sybil, but by the late 1980s, thousands of
instances were being claimed each year, often with a degree of fragmentation
that beggared belief. Patients were said to have dozens or hundreds of separate
personalities, some claiming knowledge and linguistic skills that the conscious
personality could never have acquired, some ostensibly drawing on experiences
from previous incarnations. MPD was beginning to look more like demonic
possession than an authentic personality disorder, with “alters” appearing and
vanishing just as demons were said to behave in ancient stories of exorcism.
But while allegations seemed fantastic, the same credibility - or credulity -
extended to children was felt to be appropriate for adult survivors.

It is no exaggeration to say
that the recovered memory movement brought the idea of demonic possession back
into modern therapeutic practice. Some therapists had the frankness to admit
the "demonic" dimensions of their work. The trend reached its height
in 1993 when Craig Lockwood
published his book Other Alters: Roots and realities of cultic and Satanic
ritual abuse and multiple personality disorder. The excruciating pun, of
course, is on alters with an e - that is, split personalities-and altars with an a, on which
evil religious groups carry out their sacrifices.

I want to end on an autobiographical
note. I grew up in the 1960s, at the height of psychiatric, therapeutic and
rehabilitative interpretations of crime, and I internalized many of these ideas
in much the same way as any other ordinary consumer of popular science does,
through the mass media. The notion of crime as sickness was familiar from
television dramas, magazine articles, and from the experts' interpretations of
great crimes like the Kennedy assassination. One just did not speak of evil.
Perhaps the liberal pendulum had swung a little too far in those years, but
looking back over the interval of thirty or forty years, it is incredible to
see how far we have gone in the other direction, into the realm of monsters and
- literally - demons. Perhaps the worst of these excesses have been corrected,
and few would dare stand up to warn of a satanic danger conceived on the lines
of the 1980s. Yet we all too freely use and accept thoroughly
"monstrous" notions like "serial" offenders, "stalkers",
"predators" and the like, with all the rhetorical baggage they have
acquired. Without wishing to return to the naēve excesses of the 1960s and
1970s, is it too much to urge that criminological theory should be secularized?
Evicting the demons from our theories is long overdue.